“Wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away, either.”

“all white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched”

“When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.”

“He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.”

“I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.”

“The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”

“The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?”